Department of History: Recent submissions

On 15December 2011, the now ousted South African President Jacob Zuma officiated the opening of the Gallows Memorial Museum at the Pretoria Central Correctional Facility, a project undertaken by the Department of Correctional ...

Wembley Roadhouse and Super Fisheries have cemented themselves as food
institutions on the Cape Flats. Family-owned take-aways establishments that
appeared on the black periphery and catered for the black consumer ...

This mini-thesis, ‘Exhumation, Reburial and History Making in South Africa’, is concerned with an analysis of the practices of exhumation and reburial through discussing the case studies of the Iron-Age archaeological site ...

This study focuses on how we can interpret political meanings embedded in Gladys
Mgudlandlu’s work by concentrating on her landscapes, murals, and portraits during
the period of the 1960s – 1980s. The core of my thesis ...

The mbopo institution, popularly known as the “fattening room” is a cultural rite of passage for
young virgins, who are being prepared for marriage among the Ibibio/Efik people of southern
Nigeria. It is a complex cultural ...

My research considers the vessels of select women ceramists in and from rural KwaZulu-Natal and reflects on the changing contexts in which their work is utilized, consumed and displayed. The emphasis of my research is on ...

This thesis traces the immigration of Madeirans to Cape Town and their settlement from the 1900s to the 1970s. It focuses on how exclusionary legislation from 1902 affected Madeiran entry, how they managed to circumvent ...

The argument of this dissertation calls for an abiding by missing-ness as it relates to apartheid-era disappearances. I am concerned with the ways in which the category missing is articulated in histories of apartheid-era ...

This thesis is an exploration and analysis of the ways in which we might use varying forms of Black thought, theory, and art to think Blackness anew. For this purpose I work with electronic music from Nigeria and Detroit ...

This study approaches the field of military history with approaches to the study of sound in order to
interrogate the concept of war that underpins military historiography as a disciplinary formation. It
delineates the ...

Muslim women’s lack of access to mosque space has left them with few opportunities to
direct or influence the interpretation of the theological texts. The mosque is an almost strictly
gendered space that is seen as a key ...

The 1990s came with many changes and developments in South Africa, especially in the political and social lives of people and their public institutions. The concept of transformation and transition became a household word, ...

The aim of this mini-thesis is to interrogate an incident that happened in Lesotho in 1982, where
the South African Defence Force (SADF) invaded the capital, Maseru, under the guise of
searching for ANC operatives and ...

Nokuthula Simelane, born near Bethal in Mpumalanga, joined the ANC's armed-wing
uMKhonto we Sizwe (MK) as a courier while studying at the University of Swaziland in the
early 1980s. In 1983 she set out on a mission to ...

One of the first things that reached me about photography was how a photograph tells
a story or stories. This experience is perhaps most common when viewing personal
photographs. A few years ago I was looking through a ...

This work responds to the perceptions of post-apartheid heritage practices as producing an
authorised heritage discourse. It contrasts this perception by approaching the making of postapartheid
heritage as not just a ...

Munguambe, Clinarete Victoria Luis(University of the Western Cape, 2017)

This dissertation examines the relationships of solidarity that developed between the Mozambican people and the Zimbabwean liberation movement ZANU, between 1975 and 1980, considering them in their multifarious aspects and ...

The study attempts to recover the figure of King Charles Mhlontlo who fell out of favor with
his colonial masters after he resisted going to war against his neighbors during the debacle
that led to the killing of Hamilton ...